A German economist writing satire about New Zealand sounds like the opening line of a bad joke.

The joke gets longer when you learn the plot: two Martian auditors land in the Wairarapa expecting humanity at its best, are promptly fined for parking without consent, and proceed on a reluctant tiki tour of the country in the company of a Wellington bureaucrat named Ben, who has quietly decided his career is over and he may as well help them.

What follows is a short excerpt, abridged, from my new novella The Martian Audit. The Martians are hovering above Auckland in their spacecraft.

The ship’s navigation computer screamed. Invisible cones were piercing the sky above the city, extending from the volcanic summits to the sea.

“What is this?” Xylos demanded. “My sensors cannot identify their purpose.”

The cones were legally defined but physically empty. No structures. No signals. No aircraft. Just geometry.

“Those aren’t temples,” Ben said. “They’re viewshafts. We legally protect the ability to see certain volcanic cones from certain points in the city. If you build anything that interrupts the sightline, you get prosecuted.”

Xylos processed this. “So the cones are protecting a view?”

“Yes.”

“Of a grass hill?”

“Yes.”

“From a specific observation point?”

“Yes. Usually a spot on a motorway.”

“And can citizens stop at this observation point to appreciate the protected view?”

“No. Stopping is illegal. It’s a motorway.”

Xylos was silent for a long moment. His visor flickered through several colours before settling on a pale, confused blue.

“Ben. You have legally protected the ability to see a grass hill from a location where looking at it is prohibited. And the cone itself is empty. There is nothing inside it. You are not protecting a structure. You are protecting absence.”

“We call it amenity value.”

But the Martians are just getting started. Elsewhere they meet a doctor flying to Brisbane, an engineer in a caravan with a tarpaulin for a roof and a senior official whose talent is to absorb ideas and turn them into workshops. At the end they conclude that invasion is more trouble than it is worth and recommend invading Australia instead. Never mind their coffee is worse.

Think tanks do not normally publish novels. German economists rarely write satire. Something had to give.

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